Rational Choice Perspective Flashcards

Core Concepts of Rational Choice Perspective

Criminal behavior is never senseless; there is always an anticipated or intended benefit to the offender.
Benefits can include:
- Material reward
- Excitement
- Prestige
- Fun
- Sexual gratification
- Defiance or domination of others
Example: A man brutally beats his wife as the easiest way to make her comply.
The media often presents crime in isolation, making it look random and senseless, obscuring potential patterns or motivations.
Senseless acts of vandalism or violence may generate prestige among peers.
Joyriding: Stealing cars for fun and thrill-seeking journeys was common, illustrating young people's desire to drive powerful machines they couldn't afford.
Crime is purposeful, with a reason behind it, even if not immediately obvious.

Even in seemingly irrational cases (clinical delusion, pathological compulsion), there is some degree of rationality, albeit limited.
Behavior is rational but bounded, limited in understanding possibilities, potentials, and consequences.
Quote: Offenders do the best they can with the limits of time, resources, and information available to them (Cornish & Clark, 2001).
Assumption: All offenders think before they act, even momentarily.
Conditions under which decisions about offending are made:
- Offenders rarely possess all necessary facts about the risks, efforts, and rewards of crime.
- Criminal choices are made quickly and revised hastily if inaccurate.
- Criminals might rely on previously successful approaches, improvising when facing unforeseen circumstances.
- Once embarked on a criminal career, offenders focus on the rewards rather than the risks, assessing immediate possibilities of being caught over long-term punishments.
Tim Newburn's summarization of bounded rationality:
- Quick Decision: Not well thought through; e.g., "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
- Imperfect Knowledge: Lacking crucial information; e.g., "I didn't know they had a dog."
- Impaired Decision Making: Influenced by emotions, drugs, alcohol, or cognitive development; e.g., "It was the alcohol acting, not me."

Offenders often commit various types of crimes but avoid others.
Decision making about risks and rewards is crime-specific.
Choice perspective models must have a crime-specific focus.
Different types of crime, even the same crime in different circumstances, require different decision making.
Example: Burglary in an affluent area vs. a deprived area involves different factors influencing the risk-reward calculation.
Cybercrime: Many different types, such as cyberstalking, romance crimes, cyberbullying, malware, denial of service attacks, phishing, and hacking. Researchers break it down into specific forms to understand decision-making processes.

Cornish and Clark identify several stages in the decision-making processes of offending.
Involvement Decisions:
- Individuals decide whether they are willing to offend to satisfy their needs.
- Most people are not willing.
- Initial involvement/initiation phase.
- Individuals choose various ways to fulfill their needs.
- Cost-benefit analysis at the beginning; different people perceive different costs and benefits of getting involved in crime.
- Decisions to habituate criminal behavior or desist depend on different information; influenced by the success of crime commission and other factors.
- Relate to stages of a criminal career: initiation, habituation, and desistance.
- Medium to long-term decisions.
Event Decisions:
- Once someone decides they're willing to offend, they make event decisions.
- Crime-centered and crime-specific.
- May involve light or in-depth planning.
- Short-term decisions.

Different stages relate to initiation, habituation, and desistance.
Cornish and Clark's initiation model (originally for suburban burglary) presents factors influencing the initial decision to get involved in crime:
- Background Factors: Personal characteristics (personality, self-control, impulsiveness), gender, intelligence, upbringing (family dynamics, poor education, criminal behavior in family).
- Experience and Learning: Experience with crime, conflict with police, moral attitudes, self-perception, ability to plan, skills used in crime.
- Current Circumstances: Marital status, housing situation, employment, friends engaged in deviant lifestyles, car ownership.
- Needs and Motives: Urgent need for cash, a job, a need for excitement to supplement income.
- Opportunities and Inducements: Legitimate and illegitimate opportunities to commit crime.
- Needs, motives, opportunities, and inducements combine to create perceived solutions for satisfying needs.
- Evaluation of solutions involves weighing up risks, rewards, and benefits/costs.
- Leads to the readiness of someone to commit crime.
Event decisions kick in once someone is motivated to commit crime; become much more crime-specific.

A crime script is the disaggregation of the many different steps and stages of a crime event.
Example: Stealing lead off of a church roof in the UK.
Functions
* Preparation:
* Select a suitable church (reconnaissance).
* Acquire necessary tools (roof lifting tools).
* Acquire means of transporting stolen lead (car, van).
Preconditions:
* Access the church.
* Park the vehicle close to the site.
* Scale the roof (ladder, climbing skills).
* Theft:
* Removing lead with tools.
* Post-Theft
* Move lead from roof to ground.
* Load vehicle.
* Exit the church with lead.
* Profitting:
* Locate a scrap metal dealer willing to buy stolen metal.
* Deliver lead to the buyer.
* Receive payment.
Exit Scrap Metal Location
Each step involves different decisions, and analyzing risks and rewards at each stage can reveal opportunities for situational deterrence.